Secrecy and New Religious Movements (original) (raw)

Secrecy, Religion, and the Ethics of Discernment

Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 2020

A common dilemma in practices of secrecy concerns the actors’ obligation to conceal the secret while keeping it socially present and animated. This quandary often generates moral ambivalence about acts of concealing, revealing, and discerning the hidden. We explore these and similar tensions with a focus on what we call the ethics of discernment: those political and moral ambiguities involved in the uncovering, translation, and circulation of secrets. While such issues can be explored in all areas of social and cultural life, religious practices provide a particularly rich area to explore. The links between religion and secrecy intersect with questions of authority, hierarchy, and the ostensibly set-apart, transcendent character of the sacred. Contributions to this special issue explore the tensions and resonances between concealment, revelation and ethics in a variety of religious contexts.

« Religion, Secrecy and Authority: Clandestine Textual and Cultural Practices »

Revue de l'histoire des religions 228 (2011), p. 175-205 (Cairn International), 2011

This inquiry examines, over a long period of clandestinity for French Protestantism, the mysteries of the spiritual resistance of a religious community battling with the absolutism of the kingdom and its demand for religious unity. The analysis deals with the appeals and the concealed practices used by Calvinists to confound the Catholic dogma imposed on them. The vivifying role of this faith that is forced to be silent – whose Desert, born out of oppression, echoes the biblical metaphor in regards to ordeal and insubordination – will be examined alongside the complex role of secrecy through hidden practices and coded languages coming up against the Christian requirement to confess one’s faith publicly.

Surveillance, Secular Law, and the Reconstruction of Islam in the United States

Surveillance & Society, 2018

Surveillance is often understood as simply a tool for collecting information, and opposition to the surveillance practices of the US government frequently relies on the analytical framework of privacy and rights violations. Other critical analyses of surveillance practices use the lenses of racial discrimination and/or neocolonial political domination. While all of these are valuable approaches, they downplay the extent to which specific modes of existence and ways of being have been targeted in the current surveillance paradigm. In this paper I discuss the role of religion and its relationship to the law-in other words, the state's control of "appropriate" religion-in defining surveillance practices. Using critical interpretive and deconstructive readings of the discourse surrounding the surveillance paradigm, I show that surveillance is used as an instrument to revise and alter modes of non-Western moral and ethical life and to render human subjects more suitable for assimilation into the burgeoning secular/liberal world order, including its concept of "appropriate" religion. I argue that the current mode of government suspicion and surveillance in the US continues long-standing demarcations between acceptable and unacceptable religion in secular law (and in liberal/secular Western societies more broadly), and I demonstrate how this paradigm subordinates and marginalizes non-Protestant religions. In order to fully understand the US surveillance state, we need to pay attention to the way that secular order attempts to define and shape non-Protestant religions and in so doing endangers its own democratic principles of tolerance and neutrality.

REVIEW - Guiora, Amos N. Freedom from Religion: Rights and National Security. xviii + 188 pp

2015

prestigious occupations, such as those of lawyers, teachers and doctors, are hindered to veiled women and that this norm aims to protect class privilege (52). Veiled women represent the visual symbol of a group that the ruling class wants to keep socially and economically subordinated; in addition, veiled women are victims of a double discrimination, because they are deprived from a qualified education, not only in Turkey but also in France whose schools do not admit veiled girls. The book was published in 2012, so it necessarily does not include any comment on the Turkish government's recent announcement (September 2013) of a 'democratization package' that includes, among other measures, the lifting of a ban on Islamic headscarves for women in public institutions. However, for those interested in the evolution of the veil question not only in Turkey but also in Europe and the US, Hilal Ever's book is an indispensable text.

Privacy, Technology Law and religions across cultures

The freedom to receive and impart information, privacy and the freedom from discrimination on grounds of religious belief are universally recognised as fundamental human rights and, as such, also form part of the basic values of democratic societies. These rights have, in the main, only been adequately articulated and increasingly protected at the international level after the Second World War, relatively very late in more than seven thousand years of civilization In contrast, the values promoted by religions have often been recognised as such for millennia. Where do the values of privacy law and religions conflict and where do they converge, especially in a world where information technology is ubiquitous? The paper examines the debate over privacy from various perspectives, identifying those areas where religions appear to have confronted issues of human rights and where lawyers have been joined in the debate by philosophers within the rapidly developing field of information ethics. It concludes by listing a minimum ten areas where religions may possibly contribute to the intercultural debate on privacy in the Information Society.

Religion as security: an introduction

Giorgio Shani (2016): Religion as security: an introduction, Critical Studies on Security, DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2016.1221194 http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/WFTjePgXxGkZMzcQpWNZ/full